The popularity of golf as a recreational and sporting activity has been increasing very steadily. In recent times, there has been a remarkable increase in the popularity of the game among women and young people. The increased demand for golf and driving range facilities and the diversification of the types of people playing golf is creating a need for new ways to play the game, particularly in crowded urban areas where golf course space is limited and costly. The increasing and new demands for a wider variety of golf driving range services has been motivating the industry to break from the conventional driving range operation of simply renting a tee box and practice balls. To meet the increasing demand and have a competitive edge, a golf driving range needs to provide improved services.
At most conventional driving ranges, a golfer pays an admission fee, rents a bucket of practice balls, takes up a tee box, and hits ball after ball aiming at fixed targets, for example, 100 yards, 150 yards, or 180 yards. The target area soon becomes littered with hundreds of golf balls, making it almost impossible to track the result of each shot. Periodically, grounds keepers sweep the target area to collect the accumulated balls for reuse.
Based on the increasing demand for driving ranges, some have started to bring in tee-up machines, golf ball collection vehicles, and golf ball vending machines to handle large numbers of balls used at a busy driving range in order to improve efficiency and attract new customers. Recently, there have been introduced movable targets that have a flag pole mounted on a truck. A golfer can move the truck farther or closer to the tee box by remote control. The distance from the tee box to the movable target is displayed to the golfer, who can use the information to select a club and practice stokes of the desired range.
But while these devices increase the efficiency of the driving range, a driving range practice session still tends to be dull and uninteresting, lacking most of the challenge and excitement of the real game. The golfer hits ball after ball toward the target, but has little ability to determine how good each shot actually was. The driving range practice session usually captures much less interest and concentration of the golfer, which tends to reduce its effectiveness for improving the golfers skill at the real game. Thus, there is a long-felt and growing need for ways to make the golf driving range more interesting and challenging to the golfer.